This year, just before Independence Day, the elected leaders of Thomas Jefferson's Charlottesville, Virginia hometown voted to abolish the decades-old celebration of his April 13 birthday.
In its place, they created a new holiday each March 3, "Liberation and Freedom Day," ironically honoring the date in 1865 that the Union Army occupied Charlottesville. Union troops emancipated the city's slaves, but imposed martial law that "enslaved" white Confederates (at least 75 percent of whom never owned slaves).
History, as George Orwell knew, is written by the winners. Therefore most children are taught in our government schools to call the awful war of the 1860s, which killed more than 620,000 people, the "Civil War," the Union term which means a war fought entirely within one country. Calling it a civil war means that the Confederate states never seceded. So why did the Union stage elaborate ceremonies re-admitting each rebel state into the United States?
Our children never learn that the Confederate states seceded mostly because they were unfairly forced to pay 80 percent of all federal taxes. Or that the Southern states, whose votes created the federal government and hence were its superiors, believed they could legally secede.
American history is today being re-written again. In 2017, Charlottesville activists demanded that a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee be torn down. What followed was a protest by "Unite the Right," which was counter-protested and physically attacked by the neo-Marxist group Antifa, "anti-fascist" radicals who use fascist-like violence to silence opponents.
Ever since, the liberal media have labeled this confrontation a clash between "White nationalists" and leftist "noble idealists."
This confrontation came up again over the ideological termination of an annual holiday honoring "slave owner" Thomas Jefferson's birthday. Raised, too, were claims that President Donald Trump purportedly said that "there were very fine people on both sides."
The liberal media never mention that Mr. Trump said more: "I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. …" He later added that those groups are "criminals and thugs … that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans."
Honest leftist media would tell Americans the whole truth about the Charlottesville incident. After investigating it, renowned author and film-maker Dinesh D'Souza told WND that Jason Kessler, organizer of the "Unite the Right" rally, was "racist" but not right-wing. "Left-wing" Kessler, said D'Souza, voted for Democrat President Barack Obama and was one of the chief organizers of the leftist, anti-capitalist "Occupy Wall Street" movement.
"Kessler's former girlfriend said in an interview in the Charlottesville paper that they broke up because Kessler found her to be too conservative or 'not liberal enough,'" WND reported last July 31.
The truth is, the 2017 Charlottesville confrontation was not between left and right, but between two slightly different movements of the left. This makes perfect sense if you know that the Democratic Party is the party of Confederate slave owners, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow and Bull Connor.
Racism has always been part of the Democrats' political ideology. Democrat Progressive President Woodrow Wilson glorified the KKK and re-segregated the federal civil service after Republicans racially integrated it. Democrat Progressive President Franklin Delano Roosevelt interned Japanese-Americans in camps like Manzanar, and embraced the segregated Democratic South.
Real opponents of racism would tear down the always-racist Democratic Party and its divisive, racially-demagogic candidates.
Today's Democrats play endless divide-and-conquer games stoking racial hostility. How many Democrats have criticized Antifa for its radical-conformity-imposing violence against moderate citizens and minority journalists? Which 2020 Democratic candidate has condemned Antifa for plotting to throw blinding acid into the eyes of those attending a New York free speech rally? Antifa is the new KKK, violent masked urban terrorists, but leftist networks and social media give this anti-American hate group unwavering support.
Both socialism and racism are collectivist ideologies. Both hate American individual freedom, including economic freedom, and want to enslave YOU. All that matters is the collectivist racial or class box to which the left says you must conform.
The left supports Planned Parenthood, rooted historically in the Progressive eugenics movement, whose co-founder Margaret Sanger lectured before the KKK. Today Planned Parenthood kills a far higher proportion of black babies than those of any other racial group.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," warned Santayana. To preserve democracy, warned Costica Bradatan in the July 5 New York Times, we need humility and understanding of others' imperfections. Even of the badly-flawed author of our liberties, Thomas Jefferson.